In enterprises, governments, or organizations in general, effective data processing is one of the key success factors. Data processing has a first aspect: to present data in an appropriate form to users. Users may not necessarily be familiar with data processing technology; for example, users would not be able to directly access a database. Even in current enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, obtaining information is often difficult for untrained users. Users need to be empowered to derive relevant information from data that is presented in an easy-to-operate user interface.
There is a second aspect of data processing: to let users operate on copied data instead of original data, which may be desirable for various reasons, such as for example, to avoid inadvertently modifying original data. With the established technique called ontology lifting, original data is copied into a hierarchical data structure, the ontology, which is convenient for users in its flexibility since an ontology applies modeling primitives that are near to human cognition (typically classes and relations).